See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/258131448

Memory redux

Article  in  Current Sociology · September 2013

DOI: 10.1177/0011392113484455

CITATIONS READS

3 182

1 author:

Henri Lustiger Thaler

Ramapo College
26 PUBLICATIONS   67 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

Reimagining Social Movements: From Collectives to Individuals View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Henri Lustiger Thaler on 13 February 2015.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

 Current Sociology http://csi.sagepub.com/

Memory redux
Henri Lustiger Thaler
Current Sociology 2013 61: 906 originally published online 3 June 2013
DOI: 10.1177/0011392113484455

The online version of this article can be found at:

http://csi.sagepub.com/content/61/5-6/906

Published by:

http://www.sagepublications.com

On behalf of:

International Sociological Association

Additional services and information for Current Sociology can be found at:

Email Alerts: http://csi.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts

Subscriptions: http://csi.sagepub.com/subscriptions

Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav

Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav

>> Version of Record - Aug 19, 2013

OnlineFirst Version of Record - Jun 3, 2013

What is This?

Downloaded from csi.sagepub.com by guest on October 11, 2013

484455
13
CSI615-610.1177/0011392113484455Current Sociology ReviewLustiger Thaler

Current Sociology Review Article CS

Current Sociology Review

Memory redux
61(5-6) 906­–927
© The Author(s) 2013
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0011392113484455
csi.sagepub.com

Henri Lustiger Thaler

Ramapo College, USA; CADIS, École des hautes études en
sciences sociales, Paris, France

Abstract
The study of memory has emerged in the early 21st century as a broad interdisciplinary
endeavor across the social and physical sciences. This review critically examines the
growing literature and its relevance to the sociology of memory. It assesses as well
the impact of globalization on mnemonic based practices. The conclusion considers
the interplay between individual and collective memory, deeply embedded in memory
studies, as it evaluates future directions and challenges.

Keywords
Collective memory, individual memory, intersubjectivity, mnemohistory, personhood

Introduction
Giulio Camillo Delmino’s perception of memory in L’Idea del theatro (1550) describes an
auditorium-like building filled with alluring images, ornaments and figures. The historian
Frances Yates (1966) explains that Delmino understood the idea of memory as both a
trenchant metaphor as well as practical means for architectural construction. The spectator
who entered Delmino’s theater would ‘be able to discourse on any subject no less fluently
than Cicero’ (1966: 130). Delmino’s spectator would look from the stage towards the audi-
torium that was itself framed by seven pillars. Each pillar indicates the expanding history
of divine thought. Like Delmino’s theater, the contemporary study of memory continues to
grow exponentially. The ‘memory theater’ as an illustrative rubric underscores a growing
readership for diverse insights about the past in the present. And, those who were but a
short time ago spectators, are now increasingly thespians, participating in the expansion of
mnemonic based research. Beiner (2008) has gathered what is still relatively recent data on
the output of the research on memory. He writes: ‘The ISI Web of Knowledge which com-
bines citation indexes in the social sciences and the arts and humanities yields over 11,800

Corresponding author:
Henri Lustiger Thaler, Ramapo College, 505 Ramapo Valley Road, Mahwah, NJ 10070, USA.
Email: hlustige@ramapo.edu
Lustiger Thaler 907

references to collective, cultural, social, public, popular memory, of which some 9,500
appeared during the last decade alone (1998–2008). Google Books lists 936 books pub-
lished in the past decade with social memory, cultural memory, public memory or popular
memory in the title’ (2008: 108). There is no indication that this trend has abated in the past
five years. Today’s memory theater has ample seating for academic theorists as well as
practitioners in museums, memorials, heritage projects, architectural sites, testimony
archives, Truth and Reconciliation Committees, and the list goes on. Yet, what is becoming
increasingly apparent is this productive melee, is that each field is more and more indicat-
ing its unique disciplinary contribution to the broader subject, as it avails itself of forms of
knowledge emitted from other disciplines. Recently, geographers have entered the discus-
sion, as evidenced in Meusburger et al.’s Cultural Memories: The Geographical Point of
View (2011). The contribution of geographers, replete with interdisciplinary titles such as
Middleton and Brown’s ‘Memory and space in the work of Maurice Halbwachs’ (2011)
and Legg’s ‘Violent memories: South Asian spaces of postcolonial anamnesis’ (2011) con-
firms this widening circle of interest. The study of memory is also purposefully creating
intersectional approaches as evidenced in Anheier and Isar’s (2011) reader Heritage,
Memory and Identity. The authors make a substantive case that the triadic tropes of herit-
age, memory and identity are now intertwined on the transnational and global levels. They
ask how these three seemingly separate concepts are affecting, and in turn impacted by the
dynamics of globalization (2011: 3).
For European and American social scientists, the key components of what has been
called the ‘memory boom’ (Winter et al., 2000) emerged in the detritus of the Second
World War and the destructive impact upon European culture from the Holocaust. These
monumental occurrences were followed by multiple global events in post-1989 Europe,
buttressed by galloping globalization, spatial decompression and the concomitant loos-
ening of traditional signifiers of identity, particularly around the nation-state. These
developments created an inversed focus upon localities, regions and conflict. The result
has been that the sociopolitical and cultural contexts for conflict have brushed abrasively
against the privileges of state-sanctioned memory and their attendant identities, as glo-
balization awakens ideological themes within local and regional politics: for example,
the intersection of Islamic memory and democracy ranging from the Turkish Model to
the constitutional ecclesiocracy of the Caliphate. For the historian Charles Maier the re-
emergence of memory signals the end of large collective global projects and their puta-
tive promise to build collectively held institutions. Ethnic grievances and communitarian
closure have today become the currency of politics, in opposition to the widening capaci-
ties of global citizenship (2011: 444). The structural and cultural contexts for what was
deemed worthy of remembering or ‘better left forgotten’ were precisely those histories
which constituted the underbelly of the ‘memory boom’ and the understandable ‘democ-
racy of suffering’ which emerged in its wake.
From a sociological standpoint, if we accept the premise that memory offers a concep-
tual framework from which to understand the relational qualities – and inequalities – of
‘those who remember’ the very task of understanding how memory functions must be
factored into deciphering fundamental processes of change occurring at the ever chang-
ing nexus of relations between tradition, post-traditionalism and late modernity. The con-
temporaneous study of memory is central to this task. In a review of Edward Shils’
908 Current Sociology Review 61(5-6)

(1981) book Tradition, Lewis Coser (1982: 608) reminds us of Shils’ lament that the
social sciences were preoccupied by a excessive present mindedness, a state of con-
sciousness that has ‘kept scholars from recognizing the past roots of the present’. Shils’
point was that the Enlightenment birthright of sociology equated tradition with igno-
rance, leaving little room to assess the impact of the past upon present thought. Shils was
prescient in his discontent. The current wave of memory research in the social sciences,
the physical sciences and the humanities confirms his intuition. The early 20th-century
impulsion in sociology to frame the ‘past in the present’ began with Maurice Halbwachs’
seminal research on collective memory. In the late 20th century, the works of historians
Josef Yerushalmi’s (1982) Zakkor and Pierre Nora’s (1984) Lieux de mémoire reinvigor-
ated scholarly research in memory as a topos in and of itself. Both explored the eclipse
of spontaneous as well as selective forms of collective memory in addition to – and as a
critique of – conventional history, its methodological techniques, narrative exposition
and didactic representations. These historians of memory, like the first sociologist of
memory, Maurice Halbwachs, were documenting characteristics of a cultural shift: the
opening once again of societal consciousness to the past as it is remembered as opposed
to the past as an object of historical inquiry (Assmann, 1995).
As a modern interdisciplinary inquiry, the study of memory inspects the social, physi-
cal, individual/subjective, cultural, medial, political, collective and increasingly global
associations with the past(s), from the multiple vistas of the present, depending on the
discipline of origin which bears its impress. This offers an opportunity for a sociology
ready to venture beyond its classical boundaries to engage themes that necessitate inter-
disciplinary collaboration. Debates in history have been particularly pertinent in that
they deal with methodological and theoretical problems poised at the intersection of col-
lective and individual or personal memory: the substance of sociological inquiry. But,
the relation of history to sociology is more profoundly reflexive and dynamic than this
alone. Michel Wieviorka (2008) has argued that the point of departure for historical
analysis, long associated with the nation-state, is fast becoming a societal form of con-
templation, evinced by the reflexivity of new political and cultural actors, without any
concessive clause to history as a dedicated expertise about the past. The emergence of a
global public, the information revolution and the inflated arena of self-narrating indi-
viduals – as witnesses and victims – has reshaped contemporary historiography.
Wieviorka (2008: 217) rightly argues, ‘It is no longer society that is encased in history,
but rather history is now in society. History is, as never before, a stake within society.’
A particularly rich debate unfolded in journals from the 1980s to the mid-1990s, in
History and Memory, History and Anthropology, American Historical Review and the
interdisciplinary journal Representations (Baker, 1985; Confino, 1997; Crane, 1997;
Davis and Starn, 1989; Funkenstein, 1989; Nora, 1984). More recently, we see mnemonic
investigations in media and communication studies, museum studies, heritage and archi-
tecture, global studies as well as the physical and natural sciences, particularly recent
efforts to associate new discoveries in brain science, linking neural physiology to culture
and socialization (Markowitch, 2005, 2010). The interdisciplinary study of memory, in
this broad sense, covers themes and topics as diverse as cognition to ‘myth, monuments,
historiography, embodied ritual and its symbolic structure of emotional intensity, conver-
sational remembering, configurations of cultural knowledge and neuronal networks’ (Erll
Lustiger Thaler 909

and Nunning, 2010: 1). A cottage industry of appended nomenclature – difficult to keep
up with – has emerged in Weberian ideal-type frames: terms such as ‘prosthetic memory’
(Landsberg, 2004), ‘post memory’ (Hirsch, 2008), ‘public memory’ (Philips, 2004), ‘cul-
tural memory’ (Erll and Nunning, 2010), ‘embodied memory’ (Connerton, 1989), ‘recov-
ered memory’ (Sturken, 1997), ‘visual memory’ (Zelizer and Allan, 2002), etc. Some of
these have become theoretical signposts in research programs associated with war memo-
rials, Holocaust memory, the study of generational memory, reputational studies of his-
toric figures and the development of national commemorative practices (Lang and Lang,
1988; Lowenthal, 1985; Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz, 1991; Winter and Sivan, 1999;
Young, 1993). Research in the area of memory and globalization is growing (Appadurai,
1996; Bauman, 1998; Beck and Sznaider, 2006; Conway, 2008; Gentz and Kramer, 2006;
Hayes and Tombes, 2001; Huyssen, 2003; Nederveen Pieterse, 2010; Philips and Reyes,
2011). Some of this work has been influenced by Ulrich Beck’s (2005, 2006) critique of
methodological nationalism, the advent of modern cosmopolitanism and the latter’s
effects upon the mnemonic foundations of the nation-state (see Levy and Sznaider, 2002).
New research on the intersection of cosmopolitanism and geography (Harvey, 2009) as
well as a postcolonial critique internal to the cosmopolitan approach, which argues that a
global nomenclature cannot be solely reserved for the ‘privileged location of European
thought’ (Breckenridge et al., 2002), revealing yet another critical framework for memory
studies, located in the conflict-laden past between East and West.
The launch of the journal Memory Studies, dedicated to an interdisciplinary engage-
ment with the field, as well as numerous edited collections and overviews make available
an enigmatic and wide-ranging bibliography, covering diverse theoretical and methodo-
logical questions (Assmann, 1995; Erll and Nunning, 2010; Hirst, 2008; Kammen, 1995;
Kansteiner, 2002; Olick and Robbins, 1998; Radstone and Schwartz, 2010; Thelen,
1989; Whitehead, 2009; Zerubavel, 2003). Noteworthy is The Collective Memory Reader
by Olick, Vinitsky-Seroussi and Levy (2011). The lead editor Jeffrey Olick has been an
exemplar in advancing an ambitious theoretical project for reclaiming memory studies to
its sociological roots. He and his co-editors perform a canonical task of bringing together
classical and contemporary interdisciplinary texts to the topic, whilst strategically posi-
tioning sociology within its expressed concerns. And indeed, as they rightly argue, the
study of collective memory, without being referred to as such, was already evident in the
seminal insights of 19th- and 20th-century sociological thought, particularly in the prob-
lematique enunciated in Emile Durkheim’s (1974) theory of collective representations.
Durkheim, the prima theorist of ‘the collective’, articulated at least one foundational
platform for contemporary memory studies. Durkheim (1974: 23) argued: ‘If representa-
tions, once they exist, continue to exist in themselves, without their existence being per-
petually dependent upon the disposition of the neural centers, if they have the power to
act directly upon each other, and to combine according to their own laws, they are then
realities which, while retaining an intimate relation with their substratum, are to a certain
extent independent of it.’ Daniele Hervieu-Leger (2000) states that Durkheim’s work on
religion underscores in no uncertain terms the central role of ecclesiastical memory as a
‘social fact’, and the very basis for cultural normativity. Hervieu-Leger furthermore
argues, that the breakdown of traditional religious sentiment opened the proverbial door
to rationalization – the entry into early modernity – through the deconstruction of
910 Current Sociology Review 61(5-6)

long-held religious beliefs that were until then defining of human consciousness. Many
of these concerns, without the declarative mention of the word ‘memory’, were already
present in Karl Mannheim’s (1957) sociology of knowledge, through his investigations
of generations and generational units as containers for transmitting social experiences
(see Schuman and Scott [1989] on memory transference in Mannheim’s work). Clearly,
the field of inquiry is wide, precipitating some scholars to express skepticism as to ‘ter-
minological confusion’ and ‘semantic overload’ (Kansteiner, 2002). This review is lim-
ited in scope and intent, in that it focuses on issues directly pertinent to a more general
sociology, and the analytical and empirical problem of memory studies within it. In the
‘Future directions’ section, we examine the highly socialized construction of collective
memory – and challenges to it in the epoch of globalization – through a reinscription of
the individual within the collective, and a recognition of the ‘mnemonic moment’ as a
core problem of intersubjectivity.

Overview of theoretical approaches

Theories of memory exist under multiple hats. Movement between these disciplinary
vernaculars, whilst making memory a ‘travelling concept’ (Bal, 2002: 24), must also
come with some cautionary provisos in that these wellsprings are constructed with dif-
ferent goals in mind. While variegated sources of origin increase the intellectual weight
of the field, they also create theoretical disorder (Olick and Robbins, 1998) by confusing
levels of analysis through ‘category mistakes’ (Irwin-Zarecka, 1994). Aside from the
contemporary abundance of memory-based research, another source for the current
ascent is that memory has increasingly become a professional commemorative curatorial
practice in the interests of nation-states, their state museums, national trusts, foundations,
memorials, Truth and Reconciliation Committees, heritage-based groups and organiza-
tions, social movements, human rights forums, even highly aesthetic globalized art forms
– more inspired by Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida and the force of the international
art market, than Maurice Halbwachs, witnessed by the recent success of the artist Anish
Kapoor’s Memory project (Chakravorty Spivak, 2009; Lustiger Thaler, 2009). In the
‘global rush to commemorate’ (Williams, 2007) these practices develop through vastly
different logics, luxury or commemorative global markets and audiences, than analytical
work per se in the social sciences.
How the memory of collectives is sustained over time was posed by Paul Connerton,
in his now classic, How Societies Remember (1989). Connerton argued that societies
recall through acts of physical embodiment. Embodiment, as cultural performance, is
central to the process of memory in that physically incorporated practices are transmitted
in and as traditions (see also Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983). In a more recent work, enti-
tled How Modernity Forgets (2009), Connerton explores the contrary thesis of how
changes in modern society affect our ability to socially remember. Memory depends on
the stability and sociability of place, as well as clearly defined social relationships, the
foundations upon which we build and share memories. Once again, the dynamics behind
this dual process are the presence and/or temporal loss of culturally embodied meanings.
The study of memory provides the temporal dimension often under-theorized in sociol-
ogy (Jedlowski, 2001). The sociology of culture (Spillman and Conway, 2007) has
Lustiger Thaler 911

perhaps been the one exception to this tendency. In the interests of theorizing historical
continuity, Barry Schwartz (2008) contends that collective memory is integral to cul-
ture’s meaning-making apparatus and therefore part of a meaning-conferring cultural
system embedded in time, place and historical consciousness. This underscores what for
Schwartz is the basic impulse for collective memory: the need to transcend and transfig-
ure individual existence.
The closely parsed relation between individual and collective memory was at the
center of Maurice Halbwachs’ (1992) sociological insight that remains today, even if
disputed, influential. Individual memory always occurs through mediated forms of group
membership: or, stated differently, without group membership there is no individual
memory. Similarly, the first psychologist to develop a theoretical discourse on memory,
Frederic Bartlett, argued that how people remember is always ‘an effort after meaning’
(1932). A less recognized scholar of memory, art historian Aby Warburg (in Gombrich,
1970) addressed similar concerns surrounding memory in the 1920s. These deeply social
approaches were instrumental in detaching memory from the then prevalent phyloge-
netic framework, by basing it upon socialization and culture (Assmann, 1995). Jeffrey
Olick (1999) offers an insightful analysis of the conceptual disorder that exists between
different iterations of individual and collective memory. He underlines two distinct yet
interrelated cultures of memory analysis: one focused on the aggregation of socially
framed individual memories, and the other referring to collective phenomena. Olick
identifies a tension in Halbwachs’ work wherein separate streams of individual and col-
lective memory are left under-related. He argues that identifying the individual or collec-
tive focus of memory research is critical for both conceptual and methodological clarity:
‘This is because two radically different concepts of culture are involved here, one that
sees culture as a subjective category of meaning contained in peoples minds versus one
that sees culture as patterns of publically available symbols objectified in society’ (1999:
336). These are expressed as ‘collected memories’ (an aggregate of individual memories)
and ‘collective memories’ (aggregate effects which cannot be reduced to individual
memories). Wulf Kansteiner (2002) using these same two categories of collected and
collective memory makes the logical extension of this argument. Whilst Halbwachs’
insight is that individual memory cannot be conceived outside of collective memory, the
opposite is not the case. Collective memories cannot be accessed through individual
memory. Collective memory, he argues, is more dependent on the political interest and
opportunities of the present. It will, eventually, through the passage of time and genera-
tional change become disembodied and reappear as ‘low intensity memories’ which are
composed of widely shared representations and supported by political and cultural inter-
ests, till the next process of generational change unfolds and comes to fruition.
An expansion of Halbwachs’ concept of collective memory is found in Jan Assmann’s
corrective (2005). Assmann develops the concept mnemohistory as the study of how the
past is remembered as opposed to the past as and object of inquiry as such. Mnemohistory
examines diachronic and synchronic continuities and discontinuities: referring to narra-
tological changes within the course of time, positioned against things as they exist within
a given period of time. Assmann theorizes two mnemonic layers within collective mem-
ory: cultural memory and communicative memory. Communicative memory – syn-
chronic memory – is distinguished by its temporal horizon. Limited in nature, it lasts
912 Current Sociology Review 61(5-6)

around four generations. It is further distinguished by proximity to the everyday. Cultural

memory – diachronic memory – functions in a diametrically opposite manner. It is
marked by distance from everyday life. It has a capacity to reconstruct the past, through
self-objectification, and thereby produce a normative self-image that is reflexive.
Cultural memory therefore requires preservation, the archive, the canon as well as a ritu-
alized embodiment of the commemorative act itself. It is therefore part of the way
remembering, as a cultural process, is mediated across time and space, as it gathers and
engenders meaning. Both comprise the realm of collective memory and thereby broaden
Halbwachs’ early conceptualization.
Alon Confino (2010) argues that Halbwachs came to the conclusion that individual
memory was composed of a multiplicity of pasts residing within the consciousness of the
social actor. Individuals are the carriers of multiple memories based on nation, family
and religion. It is group membership, however, that maintains the living link to memory,
with individuals as conduits for remembering. Not everyone has such a sanguine view of
Halbwachs’ legacy (Gedi and Elam, 1996). Halbwachs’ approach also remains problem-
atic for critics such as Astrid Erll and Nunning (2010). Erll and Nunning (2010: 4) are
wary of the residual power of the ‘collective’ idiom in Halbwachs’ work, and prefer the
term cultural memory – understood as ‘accentuating the connection of memory on the
one hand to socio-cultural contexts on the other’. In spite of this broader critique,
Halbwachs did articulate in a later work (1952 [1925]) a conceptual space for multiplic-
ity, and hence multiple collective memories. At any rate, the above theoretical reformula-
tions represent but a layering of the some of the theoretical issues, elicited by an
interdisciplinary field of inquiry, which views as its task to explain mnemonic processes.
In this next section, we concentrate on two areas of empirical research: (a) the intersec-
tion of memory, politics and reputation studies, and (b) the nation-state and sites of
memory.

Empirical evidence
Scholarly production in the politics of memory explores the compendium of ‘available
pasts’ for individuals, groups, local and global movements, memory choreographers and
entrepreneurs as well as national and religious institutions (Conway, 2008; Jansen,
2007). It was again Halbwachs who theorized the departure point for many of these
explorations, through his notion of ‘presentism’ referring to the use of a highly malleable
past in the service of the present. Views on presentism vary widely. Schwartz (1982) and
Coser (1992: 26) have indicated that Halbwachs’ ‘presentist’ approach, pushed to its
limit, would offer little sense of continuity to history, indicating the need for a more
measured position wherein ‘historical memory has both cumulative and presentist ele-
ments’. Hutton (1993) has argued that Halbwachs’ de-centering notion of presentism (the
power of the present to frame/interpret the past and then redirect it as a representation of
the past) anticipated the fragmentation of master narratives, presaging the postmodern
turn in the social sciences and humanities. Presentism, in this regard, has been an opera-
tional as well as sensitizing concept (Blumer, 1954), for both instrumentalist and con-
structionist/meaning-making approaches. As Olick and Robbins (1998: 128) argue: ‘The
former see memory entrepreneurship as a manipulation of the past for particular
Lustiger Thaler 913

purposes, where the latter see selective memory as an inevitable consequence in that we
interpret the world – including the past – on the basis of our own experience and within
cultural frameworks.’ The now classic statement of Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) on
invented tradition, in the service of political expediency and legitimacy after the Great
War, is an example of the instrumentalist position (see the research on invented traditions
in contemporary Israel, Zerubavel, 1995). The cultural analysis of Lyn Spillman and
Brian Conway (2007) on the intersection of memory, embodiment and text is an example
of the constructionist tendency. Schwartz (1996) in reference to this division stresses that
both positions (instrumentalists and cultural constructionists) have more in common than
is apparent, in that they equally accept the premise of the past as a dependent variable,
that is to say a product of presentist interests, as opposed to the more productive concern
with degrees and variations of malleability. Scholars analyzing the malleability of the
past have reframed the discussion of memory as a processual phenomenon, thereby his-
toricizing the question of constraints as well as opportunities (Olick, 1999; Olick and
Levy, 1997; Olick and Robbins, 1998; Zelizer, 1992).
Schudson (1989) has argued, in his investigation of the Watergate Affair, that regard-
less of the reconfiguring power of memory, the past remains durable. The re-representa-
tion of history by collective memory does not occur without resistance. History, like
remembrance, is a selective process, as well as being an ideological resource for groups
in the present. Iconic historical events and personalities in the history of the nation-state
are examples of this phenomena: for example, the history of slavery in the United States,
the assassination of President John F Kennedy, or the je me souviens dictum printed on
car license plates in the Canadian province of Québec, recalling the loss of French sov-
ereignty to the British, on the Plains of Abraham. Every society performs its cultural
recollections in distinctive and diagnostic ways (Terdiman, 1993), suggesting an array of
diverse political interests, shifts in the temporal meanings of historical figures and events
and their incorporation within a variety of present-oriented mnemonic strategies and
techniques. These determine the valiance of constraints and opportunities in any given
situation, which rely on specific readings of the past. The history of conflicts around
memorials, wartime sites of destruction, the Great War, the Second World War, the
Holocaust, genocide, the Vietnam War, and sites associated with gross human rights
violations, attest to the value of the processual approach outlined by Olick (1999; Olick
and Levy, 1997; Olick and Robbins, 1998) and empirically confirmed in the works of
Young (1993), Zelizer (1992) and Lustiger Thaler and Wiedemann (2012). This suggests
that historicizing memory provides a temporal tableau of knowledge about human
agency, or what Jan Assmann has called mnemohistory (the study of how the past is
remembered as opposed to the past as an object of inquiry as such). It is through an
examination of mnemonic discourses and agencies, over time, that we come to under-
stand the intersubjective meanings associated with past mental frameworks, the role of
historical figures, events, as well the mnemonic materiality and cultural lives of artifacts,
now the common coin of debate in memorial museums (on conflicts surrounding memo-
rial museums, see Crane, 2000; Lustiger Thaler, 2008; Winter, 2006).
The study of historical figures has been a strong focus in memory research, certainly in
the United States (see Larson and Lizardo, [2007] on Che Guevara; Schuman et al. [2005]
on Christopher Columbus). Barry Schwartz (1997), an early and central contributor to the
914 Current Sociology Review 61(5-6)

memory literature in sociology, has looked at commemorative symbolism in the African

American community through which Lincoln was transformed from a conservative in the
Jim Crow era to the personification of racial justice. Commemorative practice has the
power to transcend the complexities of ‘actual history’. Quoting the philosopher Susanne
K Langer (1957: 133), Schwartz states that the commemorative impulse resides in the
power of ‘formulating experience, and presenting it objectively for contemplation’. He
cautions, however, against the reduction of social or collective memory to a politics of
memory. Schwartz insists that the temporal essence of memory is associated with how the
past is woven into an ongoing process of change. Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz (1991)
examine the mnemonic associations surrounding the Vietnam War Memorial. They look
at processes, through which meaning and culture are produced as a backdrop for express-
ing dissenting views and their validation in public consciousness. The memorial has
emerged as a narratological search for the multiple meanings of the war. For Wagner-
Pacifici and Schwartz efforts to memorialize a difficult history calls into question
Durkheim’s position that moral unity is the penultimate goal of commemoration. For
Marita Sturken (1997) the same Vietnam War Memorial is indicative of two contesting
ethos in conflict, played out within the memorial itself; one an imperialist masculine rep-
resentation of the soldier, the other a discourse of remembrance of the veterans and their
families. The memorial therefore legitimates two mnemonic narratives, as they ‘attempt
to conceal and to offer themselves as the primary narrative, while they provide a screen
for projections of a multitude of memories and individual interpretations’.
War memorials have been a rich subject of memory research (Evans and Lunn, 1997;
Mayo, 1988; Mosse, 1986; Winter, 2006). Such studies argue that modern warfare has
created the conditions wherein the historian or social scientist is no longer the sole actor
determining representation. Victims narrate themselves into mnemohistory, recounting
personal stories at the crossroads of powerful collective representations. These personal
recollections are captured in witness genres, through video and audio-based testimony
(Holocaust based testimonies as well as the Latin American tradition of testimonia have
been exemplars of this) and memoir (Friedlander, 1993; Hartman, 1993; Hirsch, 2008;
Langer, 1991; Young, 1988). The cultural historian and critic Andreas Huyssen (2003)
argues that much of this own thinking about memory is driven by skepticism as to the
over-stated role of victim trauma in the memory literature. Huyssen (2003: 8) argues:
‘too much of the contemporary memory discourse focuses on the personal – on testi-
mony, memoir, subjectivity, traumatic memory – either in poststructuralist psychoana-
lytic perspectives or in attempts to shore-up a therapeutic popular sense of the authentic
and experiential’. Huyssen, however, ignores how subjective invocations of memory –
through the continuity and discontinuity of historical processes, as well as the experien-
tial shaping of the past endemic to generational transformation – create novel contexts
for empathy, sympathy, intuition and intentionality, all critical components of an inter-
subjective world. Cartoonist Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale as second-gener-
ation Holocaust memory is a case in point, in which antagonists (Nazis) and protagonists
(Jews) are imagined as cats and mice, and narrated within a genre from Spiegelman’s
youth, the golden age of the comic book. Lastly, survivor testimony, now part of the
canonical archive, deposits unique individual traces within broad historical and mne-
monic processes, and represents in many cases the sole counterpoint to the overt
Lustiger Thaler 915

collectivization of events, wherein individual memory becomes subsumed within the

politics and identity concerns of collective memory (Lustiger Thaler, 2008, 2009, 2012).
In a consideration of the generational transference of mnemonic knowledge within
feminism, Luisa Passerini advances the discussion by invoking the othered voice and its
relation to memory, through an appeal to an intersubjectivity that is both articulated and
fragmented in one and the same moment. She argues for ‘sending a message which is
neither authoritarian nor authoritative but rather suspended, incomplete – the opposite of
the message of the veteran or the survivor. Not: you who have not lived that experience
cannot understand – unless you listen to me, but: I cannot understand my experience
unless you take it up and propose your meaning for it’ (Passerini, 2000; see also Passerini,
2007). This returns us to the centrality of the individual voice as a critical interpreter/
interlocutor within an intersubjective/intergenerational field, and not as a mere proxy for
the veteran or survivor, nor as a surrogate for a ‘therapeutic popular sense of the authen-
tic and experiential’, but a separate field of ongoing meaning-making about the past in
the present. Androff (2008) has shown how the individual voice within the political
sphere of reconciliation taking place before Truth and Reconciliation Committees
(TRCs) stands as a stark reminder of the difficult memories of the aggrieved, which these
Committees cannot fully share, and indeed presage a growing concern about the effec-
tiveness of TRCs up against the social and political predicament of ‘pardoning the unpar-
donable’ (Derrida and Wieviorka, 2001).
The conflict-laden process inherent to the transference of memory has been examined
by Ducharme and Fine (1995) in an investigation of negative sources for societal cohe-
sion. The authors examine how the commemoration of negative events and disreputable
reputations, in this case the treason narrative of Benedict Arnold, contributes to American
social solidarity. Schudson’s (1989) study of the Watergate Affair in American memory
documents multiple versions of the scandal in the public’s collective memory. Zelizer
(1992) examines the Kennedy assassination in American consciousness, through the lens
of the cultural authority of the media as an exemplar of mnemonic management. Vinitsky-
Seroussi (2010) examines the fragmented process of commemorating difficult pasts that
hold little collective resolution, as in the commemorative date of the Yitzak Rabin’s
assassination. The author brings to the Israeli case what Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz
(1991) and Sturken (1997) have similarly brought to an understanding of the mnemonic
navigation of difficult pasts in the USA. A particularly astute critic of memorials, James
Young (2000), in his capacity as an appointed member of the Findungskommission for
the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, has argued whether the then intended site in the
Potsdamer Platz would not so much mark the memory of the murders, as bury it alto-
gether. For Young, the value of the German national debate around the Memorial brings
to the fore the labyrinthine complexity of historical amnesia, regarding the Holocaust,
within the context of the German nation-state.
Memory and the nation-state are closely articulated and represent a baseline for think-
ing through the problem of collective remembrance. Gillis (1994), in an excellent edited
collection on commemoration and the nation-state, brings together writers such as John
Bodner, David Lowenthal, Yael Zerubavel, Claudia Koonz and others. In his introduc-
tion, Gillis argues that the development of memory, commemorative practices and mne-
monic techniques, across a wide berth of nations, was fundamental to the rebuilding of
916 Current Sociology Review 61(5-6)

Western European national identities. One can also argue the accompanying thesis, that
the mnemonic effects unleashed in 1989, particularly in Mitteleuropa, contributed to the
complexities of currently unresolved and competing national identities. The problem of
memory and the nation-state was perhaps most definitively posed by Pierre Nora (1984)
in his magisterial statement on French memory in his Lieux de mémoire series. For Nora,
the milieux de mémoire – as a form of naturalized collective memory – has become self-
consciously externalized as a site, a lieux, which has since expired. Memory is now
contained in conscious preservationist techniques: national heritage sites, the canonical
archive, museum and speeches. Memory as living experience has been overcome by the
professionalization of the past, with history as its authoritative voice. Pierre Nora’s work
has influenced a vast array of comparative international research on sites of memory. It
has been useful in understanding 19th-century identity politics, particularly in Europe
and the rise of contemporary ethnic identity claims (see Isnenghi [2010] for the applica-
tion of the Lieux de mémoire for the Italian case; Jacques Le Rider [2010] for the case of
Mitteleuropa; and Hebel [2010] for the American case). For Nora, what dissipates is
spontaneous memory – the lived experience of a relationship to the past – crowded out
by preservationist representations: recalling Halbwachs’ chilling image of history as a
crowded cemetery, with room constantly made vacant for new tombstones (quoted in
Crane, 1997).
In spite of the important critique of history offered by Nora, Lieux de mémoire also
underlines a self-conscious conservative valorization of a nation-state in crisis. Nora’s
Lieux de mémoire inevitably emerges as a melancholic narrative for French memory and
identity. As Pim den Boer (2010: 21) rightly argues, ‘Most Lieux de mémoire were primar-
ily part of the identity politics of the French nation and functioned to imprint the key
notions of national history on the outillage mental [set of mental tools] of French citizens.’
Indeed, it was the prospect of future European integration that spurred Nora to begin the
project of creating a mnemonic inventory of French culture. The study of memory, as the
empirical research demonstrates, allows us to view the malleability of identities and their
possible iterations. Debates in the sociology of memory, its cultural constraints and oppor-
tunities, are empirical examples of this broader question. Olick and Levy (1997) have
made the case that the memory of the Holocaust constrained and limited political claims
making in the Federal Republic of Germany. While certainly this has been true for a por-
tion of the German postwar political experience, the opposite thesis presents itself as well.
Brian Conway (2008), in an examination of the case of Bloody Sunday in Ireland, is more
circumspect as to the weight of past constraints in highly politicized contexts. In the
Bloody Sunday case, Conway argues that it was the political pragmatism of the times, and
its selective drawing upon the past, which trumped constraints of the past and the
Republican memories of that terrible day. Other assessments of the German case focus
less on strategic constraints within political society, expressed at the national level, and
examine mnemonic divisions on the local and regional levels. These authors (Lustiger
Thaler and Wiedemann, 2012: 47) focus on the gaming of constraints within German civil
society, wherein successful efforts were made by right-wing forces to memorialize ‘the
names of the fallen or missing German soldiers, women who assisted the German “defence
forces”, Red Cross workers, victims of Allied air-strikes as well as those who were part of
the forced relocation campaign’. Indeed, these amnesiac-like proclivities in German civil
Lustiger Thaler 917

society impeded the funding and development of memorials at actual sites of destruction
– associated with former concentration camps – to the victims of the Holocaust.
As mentioned earlier, in reference to Lewis Coser and Barry Schwartz’s correctives,
memory is a political, cultural and social phenomenon produced by dynamics in the
present – political pragmatism – as well as selective memory constructs from the past(s).
These carry both constraints and enablers, and are deeply tied to processes, unfolding
differentially, dependent on time, place and political/cultural context. Memory, in this
sense, remains an open inquiry as to which remembrances are being accessed for use in
the present, particularly within a global context focused on the porosity of borders.
Research questions abound. Can there be something like a universalist memory which
escapes Western or Eastern reductionism, a global ethical space for successful forgive-
ness (Margalit, 2002: 208) And, if so, which life experiences are being recognized and
retrieved? These categories themselves have become reanimated as a result of the dif-
ferentiated effects of uneven global processes, challenges to both democratic and des-
potic systems, weaker systems of hegemony, growing multi-polarity, new geographies of
trade and a growing public ‘social distrust’ surrounding weakened sovereign states. From
the standpoint of a global perspective, particularly in contemporary post-conflict socie-
ties (Africa, Latin America), one can speak of ‘too much memory’, or alternatively not
enough. Certainly, most would agree that we are in the throes of several competing
modernities and capitalisms (Nederveen Pieterse, 2007) underscoring highly differenti-
ated spatial, economic, cultural and personal subject positions and locations. The inter-
section of memory and the cosmopolite heralds a new research field in the conflict-laden
globalization of memory (Beck, 2006). This intersection has historical precedents. Karl
Jaspers’ insights regarding the Axial Age, 800–200 bce, characterized by trans-regional
cultural transformation and hybridity, brings our current moment into focus. Eric
Voegelin (in Federici, 2002) has similarly called the Axial Age the ‘Great Leap of Being’
precipitated by a shift from societal to individual values and freedoms (see also Sheldon
Pollacks’ [2006] discussion of Sanskrit cosmopolitanism and the much later ascent of
Latin in Europe, which radically changed local, regional, national and international ver-
naculars, culture and mnemonic processes). These earlier non-Western indices have a
sobering effect on the European problematic of modernity and its ‘universal’ quality, as
we move forward in yet a new era of cosmopolitan globalization(s) between East and
West (Dudden, 2008; Gallicchio, 2007; Kwon, 2008; Neederveen Pieterse, 2006;
Norindr, 1996; Rozman, 2004). In a critical assessment of cosmopolitanism, Jan
Nederveen Pieterse (2007) has argued, ‘there is no cosmopolitanism without access to
the collective memory of others. A cosmopolitanism that is informed from one part of the
world only, that monopolizes the world in a single language such as Human Rights or a
single cultural system, is not cosmopolitan but hegemony.’

Future directions: Subjectivity, intersubjectivity and

collective memory
It is at precisely this juncture that we see future directions for memory research within a
global context. Allan Megill (2007) has identified an interesting conduit linking memory
to the increasingly insecure identities of the nation-state and the rise of individualism.
918 Current Sociology Review 61(5-6)

Relying on Benedict Anderson’s notion of ‘imagined communities’ (1983), he argues the

converse of Halbwachs’ dictum – which intimates that the cumulative effect of identities
create collective memory. Megill’s (2007) point is that in a period of an increasing non-
fixity of identity, memory emerges as a wellspring that constitutes identities, rather than
being constituted by it. Perhaps more germane, he addresses the tension between history
and memory by reframing the relationship of individual to collective memory through
the problem of subjectivity. Megill (2007: 196) states, ‘far from being history’s raw
material, memory is an “other” that haunts history. It is thus by definition subjective; it
may also be irrational and inconsistent.’ Indeed, one can make the argument that what
Megill identifies as subjective is more accurately intersubjective, insofar as subjectivity
emerges from intersubjective fields, which frame our cultural experiences. Memory as
such occupies two distinct horizons: the analytical and the empirical. First, it is an ana-
lytical concept, in that it is immersed in the very engine of social transformation and
therefore the constitution of self. As an empirical concept, the closely parsed relationship
of individual subjectivity, intersubjectivity and ‘the collective memory’ –mediated by
power differentials, politics and cultural specificity – underscores innovative research
questions pertaining to the mobile meaning(s) of the past as they migrate forward – and
the conflicts they signal, revivify, and bring once more into the open – within the context
of the present.
This begs a broader issue, in terms of the analytical component alluded to above and
how it critically addresses the over-socialized understanding of collective memory, and
the abstracted personhood it tables. Let us turn for a moment to the insight of the moral
philosopher Wilfrid Sellers (1977) and his notion of the ‘we-intention’. For Sellers the
‘we-intention’ underscores a process of historical narration that poses the question: ‘who
are we, how did we come to be what we are, and what might we become’, rather than an
answer to the question, ‘what rules should dictate my actions’ (Sellers, 1989). The ‘we-
intention’ offers a useful critique of Durkheim’s notion of solidarity. The latter carries
within it the ‘we’ locution – ‘as one of us’ – but dramatically understates the ‘they’ accusa-
tion, which defines one as not belonging. The work of Luisa Passerini (2000, 2007) on the
recognition of shared or shareable narratives (shared referring to the past and shareable
referring to the proleptic character of memory to be future oriented) offers not only a way
to think about globalized applications of local or national memories, but also a way for-
ward in the individual/collective dilemma of ‘we’ as a source of exclusion posed by
Sellers. Sharable narratives reintroduce the ‘remembering individual’ into a state of ten-
sion with the narrative of the collective memory, as the dialectic of subjectivity and inter-
subjectivity is mapped onto cultural and political life through the transference of
generational knowledge. What can be shared, narrated and critically renarrated (sharable)
emerges as an empirical question (see Armstrong [2002] on the gay and lesbian move-
ments and their variegated remembrances in differing spatially located communities
regarding selfhood and sexual orientation). It potentially captures multiple individualized
memories of ‘the other’ in conflict with the collective representation. Passerini gives an
example worth briefly mentioning. She cites the work of Shalid Amin (1995) on the
Chauri Chaura confrontations between police and peasants in 1922, wherein the peasants
resorted to violence in the name of Ghandi, forcing Ghandi to call off the Noncooperation
movement in order to restore non-violence. Amin challenges both the colonial version of
Lustiger Thaler 919

the event, as well as the commonly held narrative of the Great Freedom Struggle in post-
colonial memory by introducing the internal multiplicity of memory; as it highlights dif-
ficult features of conflict (ongoing today with tremendous global and regional impacts
and consequences) by internally differentiated memories of collective action amongst
Muslims, as well as the externally differentiated intersubjective relations between Muslim
and Hindu.
Most insightfully, Passerini (2000) suggests that individual memories can have differ-
ent destinies: ‘It can become a weapon within a collective identity, or be subjected to a
long elaboration, moving towards a re-definition of the terms, individual and collective.’
Passerini’s intuition exposes the internal contradictions of collective memory particu-
larly in regard to how the socialized ‘we’ abstracts individual memory in the construction
of powerful collective representations. Wilfrid Selllers’ point is confirmed by Michel
Foucault’s admonition that the only alternative to a hyper-socialized society is in making
the future formation of a diversified ‘we’ possible by elaborating the question (Rabinow,
1984: 385). Alain Touraine (2010) makes a similar point, but from the perspective of
systems and subjects. Touraine argues that subjects are endowed with universal rights,
not systems, highlighting the agency of the individual in articulating global concerns
about values. Individuals, he argues, are ‘the ultimate warrants of successful societies,
characterized by a high degree of free participation in public life’ (2010: 10). Located in
the context of memory studies, this culturally embedded sense of self – the quest for
freedom and social individuation as intrinsic values – rests on the value-laden outcomes
of multiple intersubjective relations. These often appear in the form of ‘collective’ mem-
ories and their sets of relations and associations within nation-states – contouring the
political and social framing of personal experiences – and finally the individual memo-
ries that emerge from those experiences to sustain or contest their interpretation(s).
It is the complex relations of official personhood, and its placement in differing social,
cultural and political contexts, which render the above associations laden with inequities
and conflict. Personhood as such can mask diminished categories of ‘person-ability’
(Campbell, 2003: 30) in that being a person is an ongoing conflict-laden process, which
includes dependency relationships, or what Baier (1985: 84) has called being ‘second
persons’. The writing of Sue Campbell has been extraordinary in outlining relational
associations between memory and the construct of personhood. She argues in Relational
Remembering: Rethinking the Memory Wars (2003):

The distinction we can make between the content of personhood and our response to persons
– what is valued versus our ways of valuing – can obscure a dangerous possibility: that by
consistently disrespecting others and calling into doubt their person-abilities, we can undermine
those abilities. This undermining is sometimes the intent of such disrespect, and sometimes it
is simply its effect. To establish this possibility, I wish to outline four aspects to personhood: (1)
that the concept of the person is normative; (2) that persons are socially constructed; (3) that
social personhood admits of degrees; and (4) that when examined more closely, the respect due
to persons involves activities that in fact constitute persons as persons and do not merely
recognize them as such. (2003: 32)

The Western account of personhood, as Campbell effectively argues, has affected cogni-
tive mnemonic abilities in that ‘the withholding of respect for certain person-abilities
920 Current Sociology Review 61(5-6)

might affect how others can exercise and, in some cases, develop those abilities, thereby
creating a situation where further disrespect then seems appropriate’ (2003: 34). The rela-
tionship therefore between the ‘ability to remember’ and the structures of inequality
within which this takes place exposes how collective memory relies on abstract person-
hood. Personhood becomes in this regard a ‘safe, odd place’ wherein ‘disrespecters can
claim that their actions are not undermining the personhood of those they are disrespect-
ing’ (2003: 34). Campbell is specifically thinking of women, and their historical assign-
ment of abstract personhood that has at its base cognitive mnemonic markers and signifiers
that impede successful remembering.
Two influential theories in the 20th century, reviewed earlier, have contrasting mne-
monic logics to the one described above: Maurice Halbwachs’ transitional category of
‘autobiographical memory’ and Jan Assmann’s similarly notion of ‘communicative mem-
ory’ are transitional in the sense that both are destined to be social or cultural artifices.
They do not examine the hidden power differentials – the personhood and person-ability
– that have formed them. Memory studies begin with the ‘I’ and very quickly progresses
to the normative ‘we’. Critical sociologists of memory should be concerned with the way
stations in between. Added to this, our current period of globalization makes many of
these transitional premises controversial, as we witness a deep transformation of the
nation-state and sovereignty, accelerating specificity, reflexivity and particularism, which
redefines the subjective and systemic role of the individual, hence the political and cul-
tural structure of personhood. All these are indicators of clusters of intersubjective rela-
tions challenging declining forms of social solidarity and their associated mnemonic
representations. Globalization has in this sense de-centered individual and collective
texts, discourses and practices, as forgotten pasts become ever more exposed, disembod-
ied and frictional. The sociology of memory, from the legacy of Maurice Halbwachs
onwards, may indeed discover its best efforts to be less draped in the opposition between
the aggregation of individual mnemonic practices, on the one hand, and reified mnemonic
representations on the other. More compelling is a critical re-evaluation of the subjective
and intersubjective constitution of personhood, and its encapsulation in the memory of the
collective. A repositioning of the individual and collective dichotomy may prove to be a
useful direction for a critical sociology of memory cognizant of the global/local heteroge-
neity in which we live, and the shifting paradigms within which we labor. In the end, as
the philosopher Richard Rorty (1989) has reasoned in an assessment of a Platonic maxim,
one that has likely been lost to memory itself, but remains at the core of intersubjectivity:
‘what is most important to each of us is what we have in common with others: that the
springs of private fulfillment and human solidarity are the same’.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or
not-for-profit sectors.

Annotated further reading

Connerton P (2009) How Modernity Forgets. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. This book
explores the concept of forgetting. The main thesis of the book is that forgetting is characteristic
of modern capitalist societies. Cities have become so large that they appear unmemorable. In
Lustiger Thaler 921

addition, consumerism has been disconnected from the labor process, creating a gap in how we
share our life memories.
Coser L (ed.) (1992) Maurice Halbwachs: On Collective Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press. Lewis Coser, in a widely distributed and authoritative volume, examines the seminal
contributions of Maurice Halbwachs. This was the first comprehensive exposé of Halbwachs’
work in the English language. Coser underscores Halbwachs’ central thesis, which remains
powerful today: that human memory can only function within a collective context and evoked
by accounts of significant past events by individuals, groups and collectives.
Hirst W (ed.) (2008) Collective Memory and Collective Identity. Social Research 77(1). This
special issue surveys a broad collection of the foremost scholars on the subject of collective
memory. Jeffrey Olick examines the problems of cultural transmission in Freud’s Moses
and Monotheism to Jan Assmann’s theory of cultural memory to Maurice Halbwachs’ grap-
pling with collective memory. Aleida Assmann looks at the relationship between autobio-
graphical and collective memory. She makes an important distinction between informal and
official memory, and argues that changes have occurred in the memory-based literature in
the past years: ‘characterized by the move from monumental to self-critical narratives and
from isolationist narratives to those that connect to others in a transnational and global per-
spectives’. William Hirst and Gerald Echteroff examine the social psychological processes
of the transference of memory and the convergence of individual memories in relation to
the collective expressions of memory. Many other useful contributions are in the dedicated
issue.
Margalit A (2002) The Ethics of Memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Avishai
Margalit addresses complex confrontations within memory in terms of ethical and moral mem-
ory. He divides human relations in terms of thick (family, country-men-and-women, friends)
and thin relations (relations we keep with remote others, the rest of humanity). He makes an
argument that the proper place of memory is in the ‘thin’ relations of ethics, not morality.
Moral memory is reserved for gross human rights violations such as genocide. Margalit argues
that humanity cannot sustain, at present, a community of memory.
Passerini L (2007) Memory and Utopia: The Primacy of Inter-subjectivity. London: Equinox.
Luisa Passerini’s book examines the conflicted memory and history of women within the
modern European context. Important issues investigated range from the relation of the gen-
dered past to the present; feminist theory and the new social movements; the changing nature
of European identity and memory and the more inclusive environment that has emerged for
women since 1968. For Passerini, the emergence of women as subjects is based on the growing
intersubjectivity of human relations generally.
Schwartz B (2008) Abraham Lincoln in the Post Heroic Era: History and Memory in the Late 20th
Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Barry Schwartz documents the mnemonic
decline of Abraham Lincoln in the post-heroic era. Through gathering an enormous array of
sources, Schwartz associates the decline of the memory of heroic figures as concomitant with
the cultural changes occurring in America in the decades following the Second World War;
the lessening of traditional patriotism associated with the Vietnam War; the recognition of
the plight of minorities; and a general disenchantment with the American state. The cultural
diversification of America made it difficult for the broader and more inclusive category of
Americans to identify with singular heroic figures.
Wieviorka M (2008) Neuf leçons de sociologie. Paris: Robert Laffond. This is a general book on
modern sociology with an excellent chapter (Ch. 6: ‘History, nation and society’) on memory
and history. Wieviorka argues that the interpellation between history and society has funda-
mentally changed. As history becomes more reflexive, it enters a process of separation from
its founding theme, the nation-state. History is becoming a practice which is more and more
922 Current Sociology Review 61(5-6)

confronted and implicated in the diverse collective and personal identities that the nation-state
has repressed. This transformation emerges through the ascent of memory. Historians are in
this regard themselves part of a process of social and cultural fragmentation, and the steady
progress of individualism.
Zerubavel E (2003) Time Maps. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Eviatar Zerubavel offers an
original and innovative cognitive approach to how history takes shape in the annals of collec-
tive memory. Zerubavel examines the structure of collective memory by examining cognitive
patterns used to organize the past, mental strategies to bring lucidity and logic to narratives of
the past, as well investigating the social grammar of memory that mediates conflicting under-
standings of the past.

References
Amin S (1995) Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Cahua 1922–1992. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Anderson B (1983) Imagined Communities. London: Verso.
Androff DK (2008) Reconciliation and welfare: Victims’ perspectives on the Greenboro Truth
and Reconciliation Commission. Doctoral dissertation, University of California at Berkeley.
Anheier H and Isar YR (2011) Heritage, Memory and Identity, Cultures and Globalization series.
London: Sage.
Appadurai A (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Armstrong EA (2002) Forging Gay Identities: Organizing Sexuality in Sam Francisco, 1950–
1994. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Assmann J (1995) Collective memory and cultural identity. New German Critique 65: 125–133.
Assmann J (2005) Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Baier A (1985) Cartesian persons. Postures of the Mind: Essays on Mind and Morals. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Baker KM (1985) Memory and practice. Representations Summer: 134–159.
Bal M (2002) Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide. Toronto: University of
Toronto Press.
Bartlett F (1932) Remembering: A Study in Developmental and Social Psychology. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Bauman Z (1998) Globalization: The Human Consequences. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Beck U (2005) Power in the Global Age: A New Global Political Economy. Cambridge: Polity
Press.
Beck U (2006) The Cosmopolitan Vision. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Beck U and Sznaider N (2006) A literature on cosmopolitanism: An overview. The British Journal
of Sociology 57(1): 153–164.
Beiner G (2008) In anticipation of a post-memory boom syndrome. Cultural Analysis 7.
Blumer H (1954) What is wrong with social theory? American Sociological Review 19(1): 1–10.
Breckenridge CA, Pollack S, Bhabha HK and Chakrabarty D (2002) Cosmopolitanisms. In:
Breckenridge CA, Pollack S, Bhabha HK and Chakrabarty D (eds) Cosmopolitanism. Durham,
NC and London: Duke University Press.
Campbell S (2003) Relational Remembering: Rethinking the Memory Wars. Lanham, MD and
Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield.
Chakravorty Spivak G (2009) Signs and traces. In: Poddar S (ed.) Memory. New York: The Simon
Guggenheim Foundation.
Confino A (1997) Collective memory and cultural history: Problems of method. American
Historical Review 102(5): 1393–1403.
Lustiger Thaler 923

Confino A (2010) On the liberation of the tyranny of the past: Arabs and Jews in Israel. Historically
Speaking 11(5): 30–32.
Connerton P (1989) How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Connerton P (2009) How Modernity Forgets. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Conway B (2008) Local conditions, global environment and transnational discourses in memory
work: The case of Bloody Sunday (1972). Memory Studies 1(2): 187–209.
Coser L (1982) In praise of tradition. Contemporary Sociology 11(6): 608–610.
Coser L (ed.) (1992) Maurice Halbwachs: On Collective Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Crane S (1997) Writing the individual back into collective memory. American Historical Review
102(5): 1372–1385.
Crane S (2000) Museum and Memory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Davis NZ and Starn R (1989) Introduction to a Special Issue on Memory and Counter Memory.
Representations 16: 1–6.
Den Boer P (2010) Loci memoriae – Lieux de mémoire. In: A Companion to Cultural Memory
Studies. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter.
Derrida J and Wieviorka M (2001) Le siècle et le pardon. In: Foi et Savoir. Paris: Seuil.
Ducharme LJ and Fine G (1995) The construction of non-personhood and demonization:
Commemorating the traitorous reputation of Benedict Arnold. Social Forces 73(4):
1309–1331.
Dudden A (2008) Troubled Apologies: Among Japan. Korea and the United States. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Durkheim E (1974) Sociology and Philosophy, trans. DF Pocock. New York: Free Press.
Erll A and Nunning A (eds) (2010) A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies. Berlin and New
York: De Gruyter.
Evans M and Lunn K (eds) (1997) War and Memory in the 20th Century. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Federici M (2002) Eric Voegelin: The Restoration of Order. Wilmington: The Inter-Collegiate
Studies Institute.
Friedlander S (1993) Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Funkenstein A (1989) Collective memory and historical consciousness. History and Memory 1
(Spring–Summer): 5–26.
Gallicchio M (2007) The Unpredictability of the Past: Memories of the Asia Pacific War in US
East Asian Relations. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Gedi N and Elam Y (1996) Collective memory – What is it? History and Memory 8(2): 30–50.
Gentz N and Kramer S (2006) Globalization, Cultural Identity and Media Representations.
Albany: State University of New York Press.
Gillis J (ed.) (1994) Memory and identity: The history of a relationship. In: Commemoration: The
Politics of Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Gombrich EH (1970) Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography. Oxford: Phaidon.
Halbwachs M (1952) Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
(Orig. pub. Les Travaux de L’Année Sociologique, Paris: F Alcan, 1925.)
Halbwachs M (1992) On Collective Memory, trans./ed. Coser LA. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Hartman J (1993) Public memory and modern experience. Yale Journal of Criticism 6(2) 239–247.
Harvey D (2009) Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Hayes M and Tombes D (2001) Truth and Memory. Bodmin: MPG Books.
924 Current Sociology Review 61(5-6)

Hebel UJ (2010) Sites of memory in U.S. – American histories and cultures. In: Erll A and
Nunning A (eds) A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies. Berlin and New York: De
Gruyter.
Hervieu-Leger D (2000) Religion as a Chain of Memory. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University
Press.
Hirsch M (2008) The generation of post memory. Poetics Today 29(1): 103–128.
Hirst W (ed.) (2008) Special issue: Collective memory and collective identity. Social Research
77(1).
Hobsbawm E and Ranger T (eds) (1983) The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Hutton P (1993) History as an Art of Memory. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England.
Huyssen A (2003) Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press.
Irwin-Zarecka I (1994) Frames of Remembrance: The Dynamics of Collective Memory. New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
Isnenghi M (2010) Italian luoghi della memoria. In: Erll A and Nunning A (eds) A Companion to
Cultural Memory Studies. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter.
Jansen RS (2007) Resurrection and appropriation: Reputational trajectories, memory
work, and the political use of historical figures. American Journal of Sociology 112(4):
953–1007.
Jedlowski P (2001) Memory and sociology: Themes and issues. Time and Society 10: 29–44.
Kammen M (1995) Some patterns of meanings of memory distortion in American history. In:
Schacter DL (ed.) Memory Distortion: How Minds, Brain and Society Reconstruct the Past.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Kansteiner W (2002) Finding meaning in memory: A methodological critique of collective mem-
ory studies. History and Theory 41 (May): 170–197.
Kwon H (2008) Ghosts of War in Vietnam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Landsberg A (2004) Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the
Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press.
Lang G and Lang K (1988) Recognition and renown: The survival of artistic reputation. American
Journal of Sociology 94(1): 79–109.
Langer L (1991) Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press.
Langer SK (1957) Philosophy in a New Key. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Larson JA and Lizardo O (2007) Generations, identities, and the collective memory of Che
Guevara. Sociological Forum 22(4): 425–451.
Legg S (2011) Violent memories: South Asian spaces of postcolonial anamnesis. In: Cultural
Memories: The Geographical Point of View. Dordrecht: Springer.
Le Rider J (2010) Mitteleuropa as a lieu de mémoire. In: Erll A and Nunning A (eds) A Companion
to Cultural Memory Studies. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter.
Levy D and Sznaider N (2002) Memory unbound: The Holocaust and the formation of cosmopoli-
tan memory. European Journal of Social Theory 5(1): 87–106.
Lowenthal D (1985) The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lustiger Thaler H (2008) Holocaust lists and the memorial museum. Museum and Society 6(3):
196–215.
Lustiger Thaler H (2009) When empty is full. In: Poddar S (ed.) Memory. New York: The Simon
Guggenheim Foundation.
Lustiger Thaler H (2012) Interview: From collective to individualized memory in the age of glo-
balization. New Cultural Frontiers 3: 27–36.
Lustiger Thaler 925

Lustiger Thaler H and Wiedemann W (2012) Hauntings of Anne Frank. In: Schandler J and
Kirschenblatt-Gimblett B (eds) Mediating Anne Frank. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
Maier C (2011) A surfeit of memory reflections on history, melancholy and denial. In: The
Collective Memory Reader. New York: Oxford University Press.
Mannheim K (1957) Systematic Sociology. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Margalit A (2002) The Ethics of Memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Markowitch HJ (2005) Time, memory and consciousness: A view form the brain. In: Buccheri R,
Elitzur AC and Saniga M (eds) Endophysics, Time, Quantum and the Subjective. Singapore:
World Scientific.
Markowitch HJ (2010) Cultural memory and the neurosciences. In: Erll A and Nunning A (eds) A
Companion to Cultural Memory Studies. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter.
Mayo J (1988) War memorials as political memory. Geographical Review 78(1): 62–75.
Megill A (2007) History, memory, identity. Historical Knowledge, Historical Error: A
Contemporary Guide to Practice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Meusburger P, Hefferman M and Wunder E (2011) Cultural Memories: The Geographical Point
of View. Dordrecht: Springer.
Middleton D and Brown SD (2011) Memory and space in the work of Maurice Halbwachs. In:
Meusburger P, Heffernan M and Wunder E (eds) Cultural Memories: The Geographical Point
of View. Dordrecht: Springer.
Mosse G (1986) Two world wars and the myth of the war experience. Journal of Contemporary
History 21(4): 496–513.
Nederveen Pieterse J (2006) Emancipatory cosmopolitanism: Towards an agenda. Development
and Change 37(6): 1247–1257.
Nederveen Pieterse J (2007) Global multiculturalism and flexible acculturation. Conference paper.
Nederveen Pieterse J (2010) Development Theory. London: Sage.
Nora P (1984) Les Lieux de mémoire. Paris: Gallimard.
Norindr P (1996) Phantasmatic Indochina. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Olick JK (1999) Collective memory: The two cultures. Sociological Theory 17(3): 333–348.
Olick J and Levy D (1997) Collective memory and cultural constraint: Holocaust myth and ration-
ality in German politics. American Sociological Review 62(6): 921–936.
Olick J and Robbins J (1998) Social memory studies: From collective memory to the historical
sociology of mnemonic practices. Annual Review of Sociology 24: 105–140.
Olick J, Vinitsky-Seroussi V and Levy D (2011) The Collective Memory Reader. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Passerini L (2000) Becoming a subject in the time of the death of the subject. In: Bologna
Conference, September 2000.
Passerini L (2007) Memory and Utopia: The Primacy of Inter-subjectivity. London: Equinox.
Philips KR (2004) Framing Public Memory. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
Philips KR and Reyes M (2011) Global Memoryscapes: Contesting Remembrance in a
Transnational Age. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
Pollacks S (2006) The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture and Power in
Premodern India. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Rabinow P (1984) The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon Books.
Radstone S and Schwartz B (eds) (2010) Memory: History, Theories, Debates. New York:
Fordham University Press.
Rorty R (1989) Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rozman G (2004) Northeast Asia’s Stunted Regionalism: Bilateral Distrust in the Shadow of
Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
926 Current Sociology Review 61(5-6)

Schudson M (1989) Watergate in American Memory: How We Remember, Forget and Reconstruct
the Past. New York: Basic Books.
Schuman H and Scott J (1989) Generations and collective memory. American Sociological Review
54(3): 359–381.
Schuman H, Schwartz B and D’Arcy H (2005) Elite revisionists and popular beliefs: Christopher
Columbus, hero or villain. Public Opinion Quarterly 69(1): 2–29.
Schwartz B (1982) The social context of commemoration: A study in collective memory. Social
Forces 61(2): 374–402.
Schwartz B (1997) Collective memory and social psychology. Sociological Quarterly 39: 469–
496.
Schwartz B (2008) Abraham Lincoln in the Post Heroic Era: History and Memory in the Late 20th
Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Sellers W (1977) The Synoptic Vision: Essays on the Philosophy of Wilfrid Sellers. Notre Dame,
IN: The University of Notre Dame Press.
Sellers W (1989) The Metaphysics of Epistemology: Lectures by Wilfrid Sellers, ed. Amaral PV.
Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing Company.
Shils E (1981) Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Spillman L and Conway B (2007) Text, bodies and the memory of Bloody Sunday. Symbolic
Interaction 30(1): 79–103.
Sturken M (1997) Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of
Remembering. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Terdiman R (1993) Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press.
Thelen D (1989) Memory and American history. The Journal of American History 75(4): 1117–
1129.
Touraine A (2010) Sociology upside down: From systems to subjects. New Cultural Frontiers
1(1).
Vinitsky-Seroussi V (2010) Yitzhak Rabin’s Assassination and the Dilemmas of Commemoration.
Albany: SUNY Press.
Wagner-Pacifici R and Schwartz B (1991) The Vietnam Memorial: Commemorating a difficult
past. American Journal of Sociology 97(2): 376–420.
Whitehead A (2009) Memory. London and New York: Routledge.
Wieviorka M (2008) Neuf leçons de sociologie. Paris: Robert Laffond.
Williams P (2007) The Global Rush to Commemorate. Oxford and New York: Oxford University
Press.
Winter J (2006) Remembering War: The Great War Between Memory and History in the 20th
Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Winter J and Sivan E (1999) War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Winter J, Parker G and Habeck M (2000) The Great War and the Twentieth Century. New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press.
Yates AF (1966) The Art of Memory. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Yerushalmi J (1982) Zakkor. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Young J (1988) Writing and Re-writing the Holocaust. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Young J (1993) The Texture of Memory. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Young J (2000) Germany’s Holocaust memorial problem and mine. At Memory’s Edge: After
Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press.
Lustiger Thaler 927

Zelizer B (1992) Covering the Body: The Kennedy Assassination, the Media and the Shaping of
Collective Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Zelizer B and Allan S (2002) Photography After 9/11. London: Routledge.
Zerubavel Y (1995) Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National
Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Zerubavel E (2003) Time Maps. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Author biography
Henri Lustiger Thaler is a cultural and historical sociologist. He is Professor of Sociology at
Ramapo College of New Jersey and Research Associate at CADIS of the Ecole des hautes études
en science sociales, Paris, France. He is the author of the forthcoming book Orthodox Memories of
the Holocaust to be published by Yale University Press.

Résumé
L’étude de la mémoire a vu le jour au début du 21e siècle dans un grand effort
interdisciplinaire des sciences sociales et physiques. Cet article propose un examen
critique des nombreuses publications consacrées à ce sujet et analyse leur pertinence
dans la sociologie de la mémoire. Il évalue aussi l’impact de la mondialisation sur les
pratiques basées sur la mémorisation. La conclusion aborde le jeu réciproque de la
mémoire individuelle et la mémoire collective, profondément enraciné dans les études
de la mémoire, pour en évaluer les orientations futures et les défis.

Mots-clés
Histoire de la mémoire, inter-subjectivité, mémoire collective, mémoire individuelle,
personnalité

Resumen
El estudio de la memoria surge a inicios del siglo XXI como un emprendimiento
interdisciplinario amplio a lo largo de las ciencias sociales y físicas. Esta revisión
examina críticamente la creciente literatura y su relevancia para la sociología de la
memoria. Evalúa, además, el impacto de la globalización sobre las prácticas basadas
en la memoria. La conclusión considera la interacción entre la memoria individual y la
colectiva, profundamente incorporada en los estudios de memoria, así como evalúa
futuras orientaciones y desafíos.

Palabras clave
Intersubjetividad, memoria colectiva, memoria individual, mnemohistoria, persona
View publication stats